South Korean police find missing woman with a drone

At around 10:30 a.m. on July 14, a father called police from Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province, after his 45-year-old daughter with intellectual disabilities went missing during a hospital visit. By around 10:57 a.m., officers had located her with a drone and alerted teams searching on the ground, who brought her back to her father, the Korea Herald reported, citing Money Today.

The same city produced another result: a drone search found a 15-year-old boy who had run away from home. That operation took just over an hour. The cases illustrate one practical use for drones: locating a person and passing that information to teams on the ground.

South Korea’s National Police Agency is putting more resources behind that approach. Its budget for drone-assisted patrols reached 4.2 billion won this year, up 950 million won from last year. In June, the agency dispatched “AI patrol cars” — patrol vehicles equipped with artificial-intelligence surveillance systems and drones — in western Seoul for a test run, with feedback intended to improve the system.

The technology is also moving beyond missing-person searches. Highway patrol units in South Jeolla Province are using drones to supplement ground patrols, while the North Gyeongsang Provincial Police Agency adopted a drone surveillance system for highway patrols in July.

So what does this change in practice? In a missing-person search, a drone can give ground officers a location quickly enough to turn a broad search into a targeted response: in Namyangju, the woman was found roughly half an hour after her father’s call. The reported cases do not establish a system-wide success rate; the Seoul patrol cars were deployed for a test run, and the account provides no independent evaluation of the wider program.